Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Maddie's still missing. Yep it's a shame and I've done this before, but I need to do it again. I walked into the local branch of my bank and there she was on a poster, there she was on leaflets on the desk all pointing to the official site. There you'll find pictures, an online diary, and ways to donate to the campaign.

I headed into Merry Hill/Hell on Saturday and all the info boards had the same repeating message over it again all advertising the official site.

So nobody linking to the official missing children website no posters up for Maya Leila Mahmoud age 1 and missing since March, nothing for Ying Lee age 3 and missing since last September. Okay they weren't abducted (unless you count their parents), but do I need to link to 9 year-old's, 15-year old's? Nah too old, who cares? Their families do; their friends do; and, to the extent I can sympathise with them, I do.

2
comments:

I've just read through both your and Tom's piece. It's... I don't know. Are we inured to this "Ho-hum another missing child"? Maddie shows that we're not, so why her and not Ying Lee or any of the others. What triggers the media into its frenzy, what impels people to start raising money to help find a child lost in Portugal while one that's gone missing only a mile away is ignored?

Maybe we don't want to think about this happening close to home, but 'over-there' is fine. But I know our brains developed with local tribal programming, which is why we all get panicky here when things happen way over-there because we can't intuit the distances involved over the recency of the news. So I don't know, I really don't.